Principal Investigators - Group Leader

MargaretMurnane

Dr. Margaret Murnane is a Fellow at JILA and a member of the Department of Physics and Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Colorado. She received her B.S and M.S. degrees from University College Cork, Ireland, and her Ph.D. degree in physics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1989, and joined the faculty of physics at Washington State University in 1990....

Dr. Henry C. Kapteyn has been a Professor at the Department of Physics and a Fellow of JILA, at the University of Colorado since 1999. Previously, he was an Associate Professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) Department at the University of Michigan, and an Assistant and then Associate Professor of Physics at Washington State University. He received his Ph.D. in...

Michael graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in 2007 with a B.S. in Physics where he worked in Todd Ditmire's group on the Texas Petawatt laser. He joined the KM group in January of 2008 and works on scaling high harmonic sources to higher photon energies. In his free time he spends a lot of time in the mountains around Boulder.

Postdoctoral Researcher

BegoñaAbad Mayor

Begoña joined Kapteyn-Murnane group as a Research Associate in September 2016. She obtained her BSc degree in Physics and MSc Degree in Applied Physics with major orientation in nanomaterials in 2011 from Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain). She joined the Thermoelectric Materials group at Instituto de Microelectrónica de Madrid belonging to Spanish National Research Council (...

Amitava grew up at a rural area in the eastern part of India. He earned his BSc degree in Physics from Jadavpur University, India in 2009. After that he completed his MSc in Physics and PhD in Ultrafast Dynamics inHigh Intensity Femtosecond Laser-Plasma Interaction from Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, India in 2015. He joined the KM group in March...

Ting grew up in Taipei, Taiwan. He received his B.S. in atmospheric and space sciences, and his M.S. degree in physics at the National Central University in Taiwan. While there, he studied plasma physics. After working in industries for a while, he moved to the University of Arizona in 2010 to pursue his Ph.D. degree in the College of Optical Sciences. In Arizona, he worked with Prof. Arvinder...

Bill grew up in Colorado Springs, CO and has not strayed too far from home, moving all the way to Boulder to graduate with a BA in biochemistry in 2004. He then moved to CU-Denver to pursue an MS (awarded in 2008) in organic chemistry under Douglas Dyckes. In the Dyckes group he worked on the synthesis of a novel biomimetic bis-amino acid and grew accustomed to smelly solvents. Before...

Xun grew up in Anhui, China. He graduated from Wuhan University in 2010 with a B.S. in physics. He then moved to the Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences to pursue a Ph.D. with Prof. Hong Ding. His Ph.D. thesis is about angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) study of the Fe-based superconductors. Xun joined the Kapteyn-Murnane group as a research associate in February...

Graduate Students

CharlieBevis

Charlie was not born, but very much bred in Boulder, Colorado. He attended the University of Colorado at Boulder for his undergraduate studies where he worked with Prof. Steve Cundiff, studying nonlinear interactions between matter and ultrashort laser pulses. In 2011, Charlie graduated at the top of his class, summa cum laude, with distinction with a BA in physics and a minor in mathematics....

Adam grew up in Wausau, Wisconsin and earned his Bachelors in Physics, Math, and Astrophysics at the University of Wisconsin Madison in the spring of 2015. While there he did biomaterials research with Pupa Gilbert on nacre and other hard biominerals. In the fall of 2015 he started the Ph.D. program at CU Boulder in Physics. The following summer he joined the KM group and now focuses on...

Nathan grew up just a few miles from Boulder in Superior, Colorado. He attended the University of Arizona in Tucson, graduating summa cum laude in 2016 with a B.S. in Physics and minor in Computer Science. As an undergraduate, he worked as a software engineer for the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory as part of the OSIRIS-REx NASA mission, and researched atomic polarizabilities via atom...

David grew up near Nashville, TN and attended Rice University in Houston, TX, graduating with a B.S. in chemical physics and a B.A. in psychology. As an undergraduate, he worked on fluorescence of molecules in order to study cold chemical reactions. David joined the KM group as a graduate student in July, 2013. His hobbies include hiking, skiing, drumming, and reading fantasy novels.

Kevin Dorney grew up in Enon, Ohio, a small rural town outside of the city of Dayton. Originally attracted to biological, “squishy” things, he pursued undergraduate studies at Wright State University (WSU), earning bachelor’s degrees in Biology and Chemistry in 2012. Shortly after graduating, he found himself more attracted to the physical side of science, and continued his education by...

Jennifer grew up in Austin, TX. She graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a B.S. in both physics and astronomy. Her undergraduate research was primarily in astronomy, studying white dwarf stars. After realizing she loved the more hands on aspects of experimental research she decided to pursue a PhD in physics, and joined the KM group in the summer of 2012. When not in the lab...

Yuka is from Kyoto, Japan. She received her B.A. in Physics from Reed College in Portland, Oregon in 2017. Her undergraduate thesis focused on the characterization and generation of non-diffracting beams. She started her Ph.D. program at the University of Colorado Boulder and joined the Kapteyn-Murnane group in fall of 2017, where she is currently working in the imaging team. When not in the...

Travis grew up in Big Creek, a small mountain town in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California. He pursued undergraduate studies at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, graduating summa cum laude in 2013 with a B.S. in physics, and a minor in math. While at Cal Poly, Travis performed experimental research on novel optical dipole traps for quantum computation applications, and theoretical research on...

Christian attended the University of Arizona in Tucson, AZ where he received a B.S. in Physics and Mathematics with magna cum laude honors. During his undergraduate years, he worked with Weigang Wang on nanosphere lithography for use in studying magnetic materials. He also spent some time working on graphene as well as soft-condensed matter simulations. He began his PhD program at the...

Guan comes from Hefei, China and received his B.S. in physics from Peking University in 2016. During his undergraduate time, he worked on design and fabrication of Organic LED device. When he found more interest in ultrafast laser experiment, he joined the KM group in the summer of 2016. Now he is working in the molecule lab. Guan likes many kinds of indoor and outdoor sports, including...

Peter grew up in Birmingham, Alabama and graduated cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in physics from Princeton University. He was a political studies fellow at the Hudson Institute and wrote his undergraduate thesis on quantum nonlinear optics in superconducting circuits with Professor Andrew Houck. After graduating, Peter joined a small startup as a data scientist, but left to begin...

Robert grew up in Redding, Connecticut. He then made his way to Rochester, New York to study at the Rochester Institute of Technology. While there, he studied the dynamics of silver crystals in electrochemical systems using X-Ray Photon Correlation Spectroscopy. In the spring of 2014, he graduated summa cum laude honors with a B.S. in Physics with minors in Mathematics, Optical Science, and...

Joshua spent his childhood living and working on a family farm in rural Illinois. In the fall of 2010, he enrolled at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana; in addition to classes, he worked as an undergraduate teaching assistant for the beginning physics courses, and he designed and constructed a project which utilized seismic diffraction to monitor fluid invasion in fracture apertures...

Drew grew up in the Pacific Northwestern corner of Washington State. He graduated from Brown University in 2013 with a degree in chemical physics, and joined the CU Boulder physics Ph.D. program in the summer of 2016. In the interim three years, he worked as a research assistant at the Max-Born-Institut in Berlin, Germany and at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, India, and traveled...

Quynh graduated magna cum laude from Temple University in 2014 with a B.S. in Chemistry. As an undergraduate, she studied the excited state dynamics of DNA fluorescent base analogues using ab initio methods. Post-graduation, she worked on optical lattices and theoretical modeling of thin lubricant films at the Institute for Molecular Science in Japan and Argonne National Lab. She started...

Christina is from Portland Oregon and completed her B.A. degree in Physics at Reed College in 2013. She is interested in novel imaging techniques, especially with applications in biology and chemistry. She received an M.S.E. degree in Electrical Engineering at Princeton University in 2014, where her research was on mid-infrared microscopy capable of sub-wavelength resolution using a super-...

Phoebe received her B.A. in physics from Mount Holyoke College in 2013. During her undergraduate years she worked on various research projects including magnetospheric dynamics, nanowire fabrication, and organic photovoltaics. In the fall of 2013, she started her Ph.D. in Optics in the Electrical Engineering department at CU. During her first few years at CU she worked with Dana Anderson's...

Bin Wang grew up in Yellow Mountain in China. He pursued undergraduate studies at University of Science and Technology of China. While there, he performed theoretical research on spin transportation in Double-Quantum-Dot systems. After graduating in 2016 with a B.S. in physics with honors, he joined the KM group in the fall of 2016 to work on nanoimaging. Outside of science, Bin enjoys reading...

Wenjing grew up in Yangzhou, China and graduated with B.S. in Physics at Nanjing University in 2015. She joined the KM group in the summer of 2016. She is now focusing her research on photoemission spectroscopy. In her free time, she enjoys cooking and hiking.

Yingchao grew up in Qingdao, China. He went to Xian Jiaotong University and received Bachelor of Science degree there in 2016. During his undergraduate study, he studied low dimensional materials using optical techniques such as near field optical microscope. Now, he works on angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) and tries to reveal the novel properties of quantum materials....

Dmitriy received his B.S. in Physics from the Belarusian State University in Minsk, Belarus in 2009. His undergraduate thesis focused on Bessel beam propagation in anisotropic crystals. Upon graduation and through the summer of 2012, Dmitriy worked at the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus, where he was studying diode-pumped continuous-wave (CW) Raman lasers. In the fall of 2010 and the...